October 2016 Archives

Dear America,

I was reading an article about attendees at a Trump rally in the New York Times a couple of days ago and I was struck by one interview in particular.  The interviewee said that if Hillary Clinton won the election on November 8, she would be prevented from taking office.  When asked how, specifically whether he was suggesting that a revolution would occur, he simply said, we will do what we have to do.  This is why that interview is significant.

Over the past month or so, Donald Trump has been claiming that the election is rigged...that the process is rigged, and he has suggested that it is being rigged by some phantom conspiracy led by the Clintons.  He has persistently added provocative tone to his pronouncements on the subject to the point that he now says that Hillary Clinton should not be permitted to occupy the Oval Office.  He has been saying that she should be imprisoned for awhile.  All this would be empty hyperbole if it weren't for the fact that Trump knows the sentiments--and I emphasize that they are sentiments rather than thoughts because facts and the consideration thereof seem to have nothing to do with them--of his ardent supporters, and he knows the effect that his sensationalistic screeds have on them, yet he continues to utter them.  Trump knows that they are threatening rebellion if he loses, yet he persists in stoking the embers that he ignited among them to the point that they are now incendiary, if not explosive, and he has used the claim that Hillary Clinton is a criminal worthy of prosecution by the federal government, condemning James Comey, the FBI and the Department of Justice for declining to do so.  And now, Comey has succumbed to the pressure being applied by Trump and his millions of acolytes by sending a letter to Republican congressional leaders to say that the FBI has found something in a parallel investigation, and though they still don't know what they found, it may be related to Hillary Clinton's email server.  The fact that Comey was being advised not to do it seems not to have mattered to him, begging the question of why.  Maybe there's where the conspiracy lies, but I digress.

My point is that when Comey was asked during his interrogation by the House Oversight Committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz, why Comey wasn't prosecuting Clinton under an obscure statute related to state secrets, Comey answered that in the 99 year history of the statute, it had been invoked only once, and that was in a case of espionage...spying...intentionally giving state secrets to other nations.  This is not that, he opined at the time, and he has never said anything to the contrary.  So, there is no statute under which to prosecute Hillary Clinton no matter how careless she may have been with her emails.  But there is another statute of which Donald Trump might want to take note: 18 USC 2385.  It reads in part as follows:

     "Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Now there's a statute worth prosecuting someone for violating.  And Donald Trump has violated it, and continues to do so every day.  As for James Comey, maybe someone should be checking his bank records.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Here's the problem with the prospect of Donald Trump as a president, and it is the quintessence of the man.  Yesterday, Trump took time off from campaigning for the presidency of the United States--mind you, he is behind in all of the credible polls and is slipping all the while, but he claims that he wants the office because he wants to serve the people of the country, whom he says are not being served now--so that he could promote his Doral Golf Resort and his new Trump hotel in Washington, D.C.  That is a problem in itself, but it isn't the problem of which I speak.  While at Doral, he brought some of his employees from the club up to the microphone to tout him, and as the last of them left the stage he said that a great many of them were having real problems with Obamacare, the premiums for which are going to be rising by an average of 25% or so next year according to Obama administration officials.  He was seizing on the news of the morning, but after he left the stage, the manager of the facility got up.  Actually, he told the crowd, 95% of the personnel at the club were covered by insurance that the club provided as their employer.  In other words, at most 5% of Trump's Doral employees could be having problems of any kind with Obamacare, but even that would be a stretch.  Most likely, the people who got up to speak, if they were among that 5% to which the manager referred, were hourly workers: food preparers and servers, dish washers, grounds keepers and the like...all hourly workers.  And those people--people who earn by the hour and tend to be among the working poor--get subsidies from the federal government under the Affordable Care Act...Obamacare...and thus pay no more than $75 per month, if that.

Just in case the facts don't speak for themselves, this was another instance of what could be called Trump's political hyperbole if you were inclined to be kind to him, but are actually bald-faced misrepresentations predicated on myths that he is trying to proliferate for personal gain, that is, so that he can put "President of the United States of America" on his resume.   If you are reading this, you probably aren't among the people who have fallen for Trump's peremptory claims, but millions of people have, just because they refuse to hear anything that is the adverse of what they chose to believe, and I understand that to a large extent.  When I hear that some supply-side shill is refusing to pay his employees because they are illegal just because they can't do anything about it or he is declaring his company bankrupt so that it can expunge debt incurred by paying him a big lump sum for using his name, I want to believe it too, and it is usually with reluctance that I go to the internet to research it.  But I do research it, and I do it thoroughly, that is, I don't rely on Breitbart or Shawn Hannity type sources.   I look for information from neutral sources that are generally reputable, not just reputable among the partisan elite.  Just as I don't accept the pro-Trump panegyrics of the reactionary media like Drudge, I don't accept the contrived screeds of the radical media, like Rachel Maddow, either.  No Rachel Maddow.  No Ann Coulter either.  But Trump supporters don't really care about confirming the truth because after all, if Trump says, "believe me, folks,"  they have an obligation to believe.  If he says it, it must be true.

I compared Trump to Hitler and Stalin a couple of days ago, so there's no point in doing so again, but I think it is important to be sure that everyone knows who everyone else is.  There are those of us who want to know the truth and those of us who only want to know what we want the truth to be.  Commensurately, there are those among our political class who want you to believe that they speak the truth, even if they don't, and there are those who at least make the effort to be truthful in the hope that you'll believe them.  I didn't like a good bit of what Barrack Obama did as president, mostly because he didn't do enough of it.  But I always believed that he was telling me the truth as best he could.  George W. Bush however, I liked almost none of what he did, and I often thought he was just telling us what he wanted to be the truth for his own purposes.  Remember the WMD's in Iraq?  And there's the rub.  There's the problem with Donald Trump as president as indicated by his false statement at Doral.  This guy is willing to say anything, and to exaggerate it too if it serves him.  As to whether he knows what he says to be truthful or not, he is less than cavalier about that...about as cavalier as he was to those women he groped, if you'll excuse a metaphor switched in mid-stream...twice now.

Let me put it this way.  There are liars and then there are liars.  Some liars point to others and say, "he did it."  That's just self-serving, misguided and illicit self-preservation.  But others say that a great many of their employees are having enormous trouble with a program that has reduced the number of the uninsured to the lowest number on record.  That's self-serving, devious and dastardly: a whole different ball of...wax.

Your friend,

Mike   

Dear America,

As I have done with the prior two, I set my mind to watching last night's debate and at 9:00, I turned it on...as if I had a choice, what with the ubiquity of the debates on the commercial and cable channels.  As on the occasion of the first debate, I got through the first half-hour, cringing less than I expected to largely because of the moderator's initial control of the discourse, but then, "shab" overtook my interest again and I had to turn away...largely with embarrassment for our country.  These two people are the best we could do.  Out of over twenty options including the candidates from both major parties, our electorate...we...winnowed the field down to them.  It astonishes me.  Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland who hung in for a couple of weeks, would have been a better candidate than Clinton, but Bernie Sanders definitely was.  He even polled far better than Clinton, who is winning the polls now, but just recently started doing so convincingly.  We rejected Sanders' sincere effort to bring equity back into our dealings with one another in favor of Clinton's artifice.  And as for the Republican Party, there was Jeb Bush.  I remember my son calling me one day after Bush had been on some junket covered universally by the news media.  He told me that he thought he might vote for Bush because he seemed reasonable, and I suppose, moderate as well.  Even Christie, who still seemed to have some integrity at that point, was a possibility.  But the Republican Party, like its Democratic counterpart, couldn't help itself and it sank to the lowest common denominator by nominating the most preposterous of the seventeen choices offered to it.  Donald Trump would be a qualified candidate in some banana republic where the elections really are fixed, but here where we have real choice, his hegemony among the Republican candidates is, well as I said before, astonishing.  Even Marco Rubio, who was almost life-like enough to make you forget that he is an automaton who just repeats the same lines every time you pull the string in the back of his head, seemed a more likely final choice than Trump, but here we are. 

As to the debate last night, everything I have heard on the news today was something I heard during that half-hour I could stand.  Just as in debate number one, there has been no mention...not even a word...about anything that happened thereafter, which tells me something; after the first half-hour, nothing worth noting really happened, except that Donald Trump declined to commit to accepting the election results, which brought even more shab to the enterprise than I had already observed last night.  Not to put too fine a point on it, we could have dispensed with everything after the first 30 minutes and we would have suffered no loss of anything of merit.  The consensus seems to be that the first thirty minutes was substantive enough to justify having the debate in the first place, though I didn't notice anything I hadn't heard before.  However, everything after that, as in the case of each of the prior two debates as well, was superfluity.  It was two people getting fatigued by a few minutes of being civil and rational, and thus lapsing into what they truly are: crass, self-seeking egomaniacs whose sole motivation for doing what they are doing is personal ambition.  It's all shab, I tell you, but what is the alternative.

Well, we could resort to the ideal propounded by Socrates in Plato's Republic.  He proposes an ideal city-state, Kallipolis, in which governance is executed by "philosopher kings" who live austere lives in one another's company, supported by a corps of soldiers similarly committed to service without personal gain.  Of course, the issue of how we might select such philosopher kings would still arise, and in fact, modern critics of Plato and his idea suggest that pursuit of such pure idealism as philosopher kings would have to embody lead to abuse of humanity by people like Stalin and Hitler rather than being the panacea that Plato seems to have thought it would be.  So maybe we are as close to the ideal Plato proposed as we can get as modern human beings.  Perhaps elections like ours are the way to go, but what role should debates like those we have seen in this election cycle play...how do they facilitate selection of our American equivalent to a philosopher king.

Well, the answer is that as of 2016, they don't.  These televised presidential debates started in 1960 with Kennedy and Nixon.  I haven't watched it since it happened, and I was just an adolescent then, so it made little enough impression on me then, but my recollection is that it was far less personal, and in consequence, it was civil by comparison to almost anything we do in politics today.  I think we could possibly return to that standard if the moderator could turn off the participants' microphones when they exceeded the time allowed them, but even then we would be dealing with the candidates that we seem prone to choosing these days.  So I think that presidential debates have outlived their utility and now serve just to embarrass us as a nation.  I think they should stop because they don't really inform us anymore whereas if candidates actually put their ideas on websites, at least there is no ad hominem component to them and we can possibly keep shab out of the equation.  That's the way I say we should go: no more presidential debates.  We just embarrass ourselves with them.  When we start nominating philosopher kings, that's when we should reprise the presidential debate, and what are the odds of that happening.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We've passed the point at which our presidential election is an embarrassment.  It is now a chilling reminder that there are aspects of democracy that are as menacing as they are liberating.  The fact that anyone can become president of the United States, being a fact that denotes our egalitarianism, is also a reminder that bad things can happen to a good people.  If you listen to Donald Trump with something other than the election and party politics in mind, his eminence in our politics is not just sobering, it is menacing.  You have to remember how people like Stalin, Hitler and Qaddafi came to, and retained, power.  They were all demagogues who started their rises to power by vilifying foreign powers and blaming them for the internal decay and international decline that characterized their eras.  They solidified their political hegemony with education of the young from a very early age to believe their xenophobic screeds the way we do our national anthem, and to put chauvinism ahead of all else in their politics.  And you can add to the list Kim Jung Un, his father, Vladimir Putin, and now, Donald Trump if he gets his way.  Donald Trump is not just a hapless buffoon.  He is a dangerous, paranoid personality who seems to believe now after several not-so-subtle escalations of his rhetoric that the world is colluding against him, and that the conspiracy is led by Bill and Hillary Clinton, maybe Chelsea as well: an international cabal of Trump haters with nothing better to do than blame Trump for his own conduct, and to gain popularity, and power, as a consequence.  According to Trump, he is not the megalomaniac.  The Clintons are as they seek limitless, autocratic power through corruption, subversion and cooptation.  It is frightening to realize that, while it now seems unlikely, there was a time when someone like Donald Trump could have become our president.

If you look at his candidacy from a distance, you see the progression from mere narcissist and egomaniac to ardent seeker of the adulation of like-thinking, one-time political naifs, who were eager to embrace a mentality that made them the knowing class in our polity.  Trump turned them into moral arbiters with one simple phrase, "believe me"--and they did.  With that simple rhetorical tactic, that is, making a conclusory statement that the audience wants to believe and then giving them permission to believe it without proof by authenticating it himself, he has seduced millions of people and even galvanized them into sometimes violent ardor.  People are ejected from Trump's rallies physically and they are not just taunted; they are physically assailed as they are thrust out of the hall.  Children of apparently tender years, such as a boy appearing to be about 10 years old whose parent or parents thought it was appropriate to bring such a child to a political rally carrying a placard that read, "Gut the Bitch," are being brought into the fold as if doing so was something other than a despicable predation on a malleable mind that may well scar it forever.  And Trump no longer hints at the notion that there is some larger, international nefarious scheme afoot.  He says it outright as if reasonable people could believe that such a thing were possible.  Donald Trump is a modern mountebank pitching snake oil from the tailgate of his Mercedes, and people are drinking it by the gallon as if it were Jonestown Kool-Aid.  Trump is poisoning our electorate, and we can do nothing other than wait for his defeat, and perhaps a decade of contemplation by those who have joined his march to the cliff.  Eventually, the lemmings will die out or get some other religion, but in the interim, we can expect that no matter how badly Trump loses next month, there will be cries of conspiracy that drown out the now discredited notions that the moon landings never actually occurred.  We are not dealing with rationality here.  We are dealing with a bizarre fantasy indulged in by a deluded would-be politician who knows no limits, that he has proliferated until it afflicts us like a medieval plague.  If it weren't for the sane 45% or so of us who intend to vote against Trump in a meaningful way--that is for Hillary Clinton instead of one of the off-mainstream, marginal candidates who don't even know where the world is much less how if functions--and the 25% or so on whom we can count not to vote at all, which group may well harbor the supplement to Trumps devoted, nearly 40% that he would need to win the election, we could be unleashing on the world the worst menace since the end of World War II.  He no longer sounds just odious.  Now he sounds insane.

So don't think for a moment that this is a year in which your vote doesn't matter because you don't like Clinton or Trump.  Don't kid yourself that some "what's the worst that could happen" type of scenario will be tolerable if you let Trump win by default.  Don't excuse yourself for not voting by telling yourself that it isn't as if world peace is at stake.  It is.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last night's debate wasn't a disappointment.   It was as vile and dishonorable as the last one, and as the next one is likely to be as well.  I have no illusions about Donald Trump.  He is despicable as ever, and he will never change.  His lack of intellectual integrity isn't any revelation either, nor is his narcissism, his imperiousness and on and on and on.  But Bill Clinton has always said that Hillary is the best person he knows.  He says she is smart, tenacious, noble and dedicated to high principles.  Yet, when she gets on a debate stage--and this isn't new--she becomes less than what her husband professes her to be in every respect.  She is almost a caricature...her impression of a politician with all the ugliness and vain crassness that our political class has imbued the profession with.  And what's worst about it is how flailing and inept she becomes when on the stage.  For example, with two credibly unbiased moderators running the debate, she managed to alienate them with a tactic that I think is contrived out of a sense that it connotes power.  She gives these desultory answers to even simple questions that always lapse into her stock platitudes about social and economic justice--which is what all politicians do so you can't really blame her for descending to the middle of the pack on that point--but then, when her time is up she insists on talking over the moderators for fifteen or twenty flailing seconds with utterances that are just more of the same political pap that she has just preached to her own choir.   Instead of wooing the opposition's choir with cogent new ideas, she regales us all with her campaign lines, which the opposition isn't going to buy anyway.  It is a self-destructive tactic meant, it appears, to project formidability while all it really does is confirm the worst things that people...even her own people...think about her.  Is she as incorrigible as her opponent, or is she jut getting bad advice? And last night was particularly embarrassing in that respect.

I don't even remember what outrageous thing Trump had just said, but the first thing out of Clinton's mouth in response was a quote from a Michelle Obama refrain: "when they go low, we go high."  After she said it, applause broke out in the otherwise quiet studio in violation of the adjured silence imposed by the moderators at the beginning of the whole thing.  She basked in it for a second and then lapsed into another calculated and convoluted attack on her opponent that was probably less than 10% relevant to the insult he had just slung at her.  It was just one more generic rant against Trump and what he stands for...far from going high.  In fact, she seemed to have perverted Obama's exhortation; Trump had gone low, so Clinton did too.  In fact, in instances in which the opportunity to "go high" was just about put up on a tee in front of her, she chose to take the low road even though it was the harder choice.  The debate started out with a discussion of Trump's most recent contra temps about being able to grope women because they let him since he is famous.  Trump had just stooped to criticism of Bill Clinton's conduct with women, which albeit deplorable isn't the issue in this election, in lieu of an effective defense or sincere and unqualified apology.  One of the moderators turned to Clinton to ask what she thought of Trump's half-hearted excuse of "locker room banter," which he had characterized as an apology.  It was the perfect opportunity to project nobility and grace...to go high even though he had gone low.  All she had to do was what Carly Fiorina did in the same situation.  She could have just said, "I think that American women know what Donald Trump thinks about women.  As they say, done and done, but nooo. She had to claim to go high and then go low right with him, leaving herself looking like a back-biting, mindless attack dog rather than the noble sage standing above the fray.  And she went on and on until the moderators told her she was out of time, and then had to insist in order to shut her up.  A few choice words would have more than sufficed, and would have aggrandized her at the same time...and she needs aggrandizing.  But she was not only incapable of seizing the moment, she had to turn it into a liability.

Like the people who are voting for Trump, it isn't that any of this is going to keep me from voting for Hillary Clinton.  I can't think of anything that would make me vote for her opposite number.  But where Clinton needs support is from the non-partisan and undecided third of the voting public, and she throws the opportunity to court them away with both hands whenever she can.  I've said this before, and I'll say it again...along with all of her other critics: she has poor judgment, and that's being kind.  And in her way, she is the wicked witch of fairy tales incarnate.  But--and this is a sad commentary on the state of American politics--she's the better choice...God help us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Maybe you can help me understand this Trump thing.  The most  recent

pernicious revelation he has had to  defend is his failure to pay taxes

for a couple of years in the '90's.  It didn't have any appreciable impact

on him when he called Rosie O'Donald ugly or when he claimed that Megan

Fox was bleeding from "somewhere," but  chauvinist boors have to have

someone to vote for too.  And when he accused President Obama and Hillary

Clinton of  founding ISIS, well, he had to consider the "birther" movement

he had spawned.  I mean he couldn't very well have exposed the idiocy of

so many people and then just left them out there to be ridiculed; they are

his people.  And calling a former Miss Universe "Miss Piggy" because she

gained some weight and "Miss Housekeeping" because because she is

hispanic, that's just epithet slinging, like "Little Marco" and "Lying

Ted"...just some good clean fun in Trump world.  Those things and all the

other outlandish things he's said are just good clean fun compared to this

tax thing, but even this seems not to be sticking to him.  It seems that

he is the "teflon Donald."  His only defense is that it's good business to

pay as little taxes as possible, which runs parallel to his claim that

bankruptcy is the way business is done, and that's alright.  What else

would you expect from Donald Trump.  But he is also claiming credit for

it...not just defending it but claiming it as a credential.

Trump says that he paid so little in taxes--nothing for as many as 18

years--because he is smart...because he knows the tax code better than

anyone else.  Set aside the fact that a guy who claims to be everybody's

friend wants many of us to pay more taxes under his tax plan just because

we didn't get rich declaring bankruptcy like every good businessman

should.  Ignore the fact that during his bankruptcies he paid himself off

from the assets of his corporations and left his corporate investors high

and dry and lots of small businessmen who had helped him build his casinos

and refurbish his hotels didn't get paid, and sometimes even got ruined so

that Trump could live in Trump Tower.  Albeit he called such conduct on

his part good business because he profited from it, he did admit it

outright without making the claim that it was a credential on his resume. 

And of course, the list of sow's ears he has turned into silk neckties

made in Bangladesh with nothing more than a flash of his silver tongue is

virtually endless, but never before has he said something as outlandish as

his  current claim that he paid so little in taxes because  he  was so

smart and knowledgeable about the tax code. He makes it seem like he 

bundled the wife and kids off to Mara Lago for the weekend and did his

taxes himself.  But, other than when he was signing them, my guess is 

that Donald Trump has never seen one of his tax returns close up.  And

other than when he signed it, he never saw the one that has recently been

disclosed...the one that shows this genius losing almost a billion dollars

in a single year...he never saw this one either.  I would say that the

only thing he did was write the check, but  he didn't even do that.  There

was no check.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but while there may be things Trump

does for himself, they probably don't number more than the count of his

fingers and toes, and that includes eating, gesticulating as he does at

his rallies for exercise, and holding his own, if you know what I mean. 

Doing his taxes isn't among them, nor is  studying tax law.  And you can

be sure that he didn't lose 900 odd billion dollars just so that he could

use a particular provision of the tax code...diminishing returns and all

that, you know, and diminishing returns are something he seems to know

plenty about given his history in hotels and casinos.  The bottom

line--another thing about which Trump probably knows something (I'll

concede that he probably knows how to add and subtract)--is that just as

Al Gore did with the internet, Donald Trump's accounts of his

accomplishments are habitually self-serving.  He has short changed

many...maybe thousands.  He has told lies...again maybe thousands, and

that is just in the past few months.  He exaggerates with alacrity and if

his middle initial weren't "J" I would have assumed that his middle name

was braggart, or maybe blaggart if you happen to be of British extraction

and braggart doesn't  quite capture your contempt.  Anyone with an open

mind would certainly see that Trump's claim to be smart because he thought

up a way to escape taxes is as ill-conceived as is most everything else he

says.  Still, Trump voters will just not be deterred from their folly. 

What's that saying they use today, "haters gonna hate?"  Well, if you are

one, Trump's your man, and proof of his lack of integrity isn't going to

change that.

Your friend,

Mike